Bird Talk Brings Delight
A Feature Review of
Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make
Becca Rowland
Paperback: Storey Publishing, 2025
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Reviewed by Courtney Ellis
I’ve been birding consistently (my friends might say, obsessively) for over five years. I attend birding festivals. I have opinions on binoculars and follow migration patterns. When I’m traveling or stuck indoors, I read so many bird books.
Spend enough time with a single subject and you’ll discover that there are a few standard genres. For bird books there is the field guide, the birdy memoir, the avian history, and the species-specific deep dive. I enjoy them all in their own way. But once in a while, a new book comes along that defies these molds. It upends convention, charts its own path, surprises, and delights. Enter: Bird Talk. One part phonetic field guide, one part joke book, Becca Rowland’s Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make is what would result if David Sibley and an audiologist had a baby who grew up to write for The Onion.
The book is divided into tongue-in-cheek sections (“Birds with Suggestive Names,” “Let’s Talk About Owls,” “Birds That Sounds Like Other Animals,”), each containing seven or eight or ten specific bird species. Rather than announce each bird at the top of the page, as a standard field guide would do, each double-page spread includes a vibrant illustration of the bird along with a compelling audio description as its heading. “If it sounds like you’ve bent over and loudly ripped your pants…” says one. “If it sounds like water dripping into a swimming pool…” begins another. Once your imagination has been piqued with this characterization (what does that sound like?), only then do you learn the bird’s name. The ripped pants? A Turkey Vulture. The dripping water? Brown-headed Cowbird!
Props to Rowland for managing to put sounds into written descriptions so well, a notoriously difficult thing to do. Think about it: how would you explain an ambulance siren to someone who’d never heard one? Or a waterfall? A sneeze? Plus, Rowland’s vivid and hilarious descriptions are easier to imagine and remember than the standard field guide fare that tends to describe birdsong either in onomatopoetic form (“Tweet-tweet!”) or in vocal descriptions that are fuzzy at best (“Scratchy,” “loud,” “buzzy,” “melodic”). Over the years, I’ve discovered that a California towhee sounds like a broken smoke detector and a House Finch ends its call with a Valley-girl-esque, “Okaaaaay?” Those birds I’ve managed to link to familiar, everyday sounds are by far the easiest for me to identify in the field. Rowland’s unique descriptions are catchy, punchy, and often hilarious. (“If it sounds like someone absolutely SCREAMING…” it’s a Barn Owl, by the way.)
While sound can be quite subjective—I’d argue that the Black-capped Chickadee says its own name, not “cheeseburger,” as Rowland suggests, and try as I might I can’t think my way into her depiction of a Canada Goose’s honk as a bark when it’s always sounded like a circus clown’s horn to me—on the whole, I both agreed with her assessments and found them helpful to my own birding practice. (Why is there a dog chewing on a squeaky toy out here in the forest? Ah, it’s a Northern Flicker!)
Good nature writing opens our eyes and hearts to the beauty, brutality, and fragility of the natural world. Great nature writing also draws us into wonder or laughter or both. Bird Talk does each of these in spades.
In addition to being a quick-witted writer with a keen eye and ear for detail, Rowland is a gifted illustrator. Her illustrations are delightful as well as accurate. Birders can be a pedantic lot (guilty!), a trait that develops after years of paying close and loving attention to small, fast-moving animals’ wing-bars and eye rings and feather molt patterns. It matters that Rowland got the peachy-orange accent on the side of the Tufted Titmouse exactly right. Ditto the upside-down posture of the Red-breasted Nuthatch. She captures birds with the eyes of one who loves them deeply, yet her style is simple enough to distill them down to their essences.
My only real quibble with the volume is that there are birds not native to North America sprinkled throughout. While learning their songs is interesting, especially for us hardcore birders, it would likely appeal more to the average American/Canadian/Mexican reader to learn about birds they will most often encounter in their everyday lives rather than those that live a hemisphere away. Including the Eurasian Blue Tit meant there wasn’t room for the Grosbeaks or the Phoebes or Finches—all birds commonly seen in U.S. yards.
Though the book does contain a specific section titled “Birds Not from North America,” enough non-native birds (Penguins, Shoebills, Magpie Larks, etc.) showed up in other sections of the book that this heading seems both confusing and superfluous. It would have improved the book to either focus solely on North American birds (enough of these are either solely western or eastern birds already, making them rare for the other half of the country anyway) or to keep all the non-North American species in their own section.
I also could have done without the Bird Zodiac, though it was more of a humorous nod to the personalities of the birds themselves than any real fortune-telling. Still, I suspect it may hurt Rowland’s sales a bit with particular religious audiences for whom astrology is anathema.
However, these are small quibbles for what turned out to be a delightful, engaging, clever read. There’s truly nothing out there like it. Bird Talk is one of those volumes you will probably finish in one sitting while dinner boils over on the stove. Then you’ll place it proudly on a coffee table for years to come so your guests can peruse it with a chuckle. It would also make a great gift for any birder in your life. They probably own many bird-related tomes already, but I promise they’ve never experienced anything like this happy little book.
Courtney Ellis
Courtney Ellis is a pastor at the Presbyterian Church of the Master in Mission Viejo, California. She is the author of Looking Up: A Birder's Guide to Hope Through Grief. She also hosts The Thing with Feathers, a podcast about birds and hope. She lives in Orange County, California, with her husband and three children.
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